Our Mission and Vision

FACES Northwest is a non-profit organization, dedicated to working in partnership with families helping children, adolescents as well as those transitioning into adulthood with autism maximize their strengths with the support and tools they need in order to grow socially, academically, and to be active participants in their community.

Everyone has strengths. With the right positive support and tools all children can and will succeed.

All children need connections to both other children and adults who believe in them and want to see them succeed no matter how big or small the goal. All children are entitled to be and feel safe, to learn to turn their potential into their abilities, and to enjoy themselves and have fun. We believe that all families of children with autism including the parents, siblings, grandparents and extended family need and deserve as much support as possible. We recognize that these families go above and beyond every single day, and strive to help them by providing support and respite. We strongly believe that in doing this we serve the child, the family and the community.

Program Design and Method: Our summer camp is a therapeutic recreational day camp. It is designed to provide community involvement, independent living skills, academic success and positive social relationships, within a recreational environment.

In order to accomplish these goals:

We work in partnership with school districts to offer an Extended School Year (ESY) program as our program targets the specific academic and social needs that children with autism have to both maintain and make gains in their Individual Education Plans(IEP). By serving their IEP in the summer months we are able to prevent regression academically and behaviorally.

We are committed to providing current evidence-based strategies for meeting all goals, both those generated by the families and those that serve the IEP. Our trained staff members are able to identify the intervention and goals, develop strategies for implementing these goals, and design programming and outcomes to ensure their implementation and progress.

We strive to proide our families and children with a staff who are dedicated to providing a positive and compassionate environment. One of the ways we ensure this is through our membership in the Association for Positive Behavioral Support. This helps to provide a theoretical framework that is focused on constructive compassion, focusing and building on the child’s strengths and not their weaknesses.

We work to create programs that will enable each child to share in the same summer camp experiences as other children, to the best of the child’s ability. In order to do this we strive to individualize each camper’s program to meet their needs instead of fitting them to our program.

In order to help the broad age range we serve, we utilize developmental group programming. This enables us to target goals for children, adolescents and young transitioning adults in order to maximize their achievement and aptitude. In order to work towards the goal of maximum independence in adulthood they have to have access to the community. We believe strongly that this comes from early programming in using community transit. Therefore all of our campers use mass transit for all activities that they engage in which enables us to scaffold the skills to access their community from a very young age.

We believe our peer modeling program helps to create a bridge program into the community as they play, work and connect with our campers in a way only peers can do. We believe this facilitates developmental growth both for our campers and the peers that work with them.

We work hard to create opportunities to transition our young adults into the community. We believe this is vital and pivotal time for people with autism and that by working in partnership with the community we can help facilitate their successful transition into the community with maximal independence.

We work in a collaborative manner with many agencies, businesses, and community outreach programs to give our children an opportunity to serve the community and in turn for the community to serve them. We believe this reciprocal relationship benefits our children and the community in a way that generates positive short and long-term outcomes for both.